The Luncheon on the Grass, 1862 by Edouard Manet The Luncheon on the Grass, 1862 by Edouard Manet Click Image to view detail. Luncheon on the Grass ("Dejeuner sur l'Herbe," 1863) was one of a number of impressionist works that broke away from the classical view that art should obey established conventions and seek to achieve timelessness. The painting was rejected by the salon that displayed painting approved by the official French academy. The rejection was occasioned not so much by the female nudes in Manet's painting, a classical subject, as by their presence in a modern setting, accompanied by clothed, bourgeois men. The incongruity suggested that the women were not goddesses but models, or possibly prostitutes.

Yet in Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, Manet was paying tribute to Europe's artistic heritage, borrowing his subject from The Pastoral Concert - a painting by Titian attributed at the time to Giorgione (Louvre) - and taking his inspiration for the composition of the central group from the Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after Raphael's Judgement of Paris.But the classical references were counterbalanced by Manet's boldness. The presence of a nude woman among clothed men is justified neither by mythological nor allegorical precedents. This, and the contemporary dress, rendered the strange and almost unreal scene obscene in the eyes of the public of the day. Manet himself jokingly nicknamed his painting "la partie carree". Manet displayed the painting instead at the Salon des Refuses, an alternative salon established by those who had been refused entry to the official one. Like his friend Courbet, Manet influenced modern painting not only by his use of realistic subject matter but also by his challenge to the three-dimensional perspectivalism established in Renaissance painting.

Manet painted figures with a flatness derived partly from Japanese art and resembling (as Gustave Courbet commented) the flatness of the king or queen on a playing card. Luncheon on the Grass - testimony to Manet's refusal to conform to convention and his initiation of a new freedom from traditional subjects and modes of representation - can perhaps be considered as the departure point for Modern Art. The modernist reinvention of pictorial space had begun. The Luncheon on the Grass, 1863 - Edouard Manet - WikiArt.org The Luncheon on the Grass Copyright Information close The author of this artwork died more than 70 years ago. According to U.S. Copyright Law, copyright expires 70 years after the author's death. In other countries, legislation may differ. More … WikiArt.org allows unlimited copying, distributing and displaying of the images of public domain artworks solely. We use here Copyright term based on authors' deaths according to U.S. Copyright Law, that is 70 years. In other countries, the duration of copyright term may differ.

Please check here copyright length according to your country's legislation before you consider reproducing images borrowed from Wikipaintings.org Artworks protected by copyright are supposed to be used only for contemplation. Images of that type of artworks are prohibited for copying, printing, or any kind of reproducing and communicating to public since these activities may be considered copyright infringement. Original Title: Le déjeuner sur l'herbe Date: 1863; Paris, France Dimensions: 265.5 x 208 cm Location: Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France Image dimension 750x591px, View all sizes The Luncheon in the Grass, with its depiction of a nude female with fully clothed men was a controversial piece when it was displayed at the Salon de Refuses in 1863. It was considered an affront to the times, not only because of the stark nudity of the woman in contrast to the men but also because Manet used familiar models for the figures in the painting. The nude woman is a combination of both his wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, and one of his other female models, Victorine Meurent.

The men, on the other hand, are his brother, Eugene Manet, and his brother in law, Ferdinand Leenhoff. It was also considered controversial because it illustrated the rampant prostitution in Paris at the time, which was a taboo subject just to mention, much less display in an oversized canvas. The Luncheon on the Grass by Edouard Manet Home › Impressionism › The Luncheon on the Grass by Edouard Manet The Luncheon on the Grass by Edouard Manet galleryIntell More Articles by This Author “You would hardly believe how difficult it is to place a figure alone on a canvas, and to concentrate all the interest on this single and universal figure and still keep it living and real.” Edouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe belongs to a well-known genre of French paintings of the middle to late 19th century depicting people of all classes relaxing in the parks or th e countryside , often by a body of water.

The Luncheon on the Grass, as it’s known in English, was painted in 1862 —63 and exhibited that same year at the Salons des Refusés, a non-mainstream exhibition space in Paris for works of art falling outside the requirements of the traditional Salon. The controversy seen in this painting at the time was caused by the nude, or to be precise, by the context within which Manet depicted her. The nude looking at you is not a nymph, goddess or any other mythological creature. She is a real modern woman who took her clothes off (you can clearly see two sleeves of her light blue polka-dot dress and her hat to the left of her) and is sitting with two fully dressed middle class men in a rural landscape! She is not ashamed of being naked as she gazes confidently at us. The two men sitting next to her seem to accept her nudity with proper respect and none of them is looking directly at her. Manet would further exploit the difference between “nudity” and “nakedness” in his famous and infamous Olympia See Egon Schiele’s Sitting Nude with Yellow Blanket. All of the sitters and the woman in the background were real individuals.

The model, probably for both of the female figures, was Victorine Meurent, who appeared frequently in other Manet’s paintings (most famously in Olympia, painted the same year). The man on the left is Ferdinand Leenhof, Manet’s brother in law, and the man on the right is the painter’s younger brother Eugene Manet. The fact that all of the individuals were recognizable and were depicted in an explicit narrative made this work impossible to exhibit along with traditional paintings approved by The French Academy. See Manet’s breathtaking portrait of Irma Brunner. What is also interesting about this work that caused such a controversy among the French society, is that, despite the contemporary setting of The Luncheon on the Grass, the composition was almost entirely borrowed from Raphael’s Judgment of Paris engraving (ca. 1510 − 1520). Manet echoed every detail of gestures and poses of Raphael’s sitters, seen on the bottom right corner. The only exceptions are the additional female figure seen in the background and the pose of the middle male figure. In Raphael’s busy composition he is looking away to his left, and Manet’s relaxed, yet scandalous setting the man is gazing between the viewer and the second man in the painting.

In Raphael’s work, which is permeated by nudity, its mythological narrative made it socially acceptable for Manet’s contemporaries, while The Luncheon showing only a single nude and explicitly assuming her sexuality reinvented modernist pictorial traditions and became hugely inspirational to young artists. This article © galleryIntell. Image Paris, Musée d’OrsayEtienne Moreau Nélaton donation, 1906 © RMN -Grand Palais(Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski Related articles Musée d'Orsay: Edouard Manet Luncheon on the Grass H. 208; W. 264.5 cm © RMN -Grand Palais(Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski Full entry Le déjeuner sur l'herbe [Luncheon on the Grass] Rejected by the jury of the 1863 Salon, Manet exhibited Le déjeuner sur l’herbe under the title Le Bain at the Salon des Refusés (initiated the same year by Napoléon III) where it became the principal attraction, generating both laughter and scandal.

Yet in Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Manet was paying tribute to Europe's artistic heritage, borrowing his subject from the Concert champêtre – a painting by Titian attributed at the time to Giorgione (Louvre) – and taking his inspiration for the composition of the central group from the Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after Raphael's Judgement of Paris.But the classical references were counterbalanced by Manet's boldness. The presence of a nude woman among clothed men is justified neither by mythological nor allegorical precedents. This, and the contemporary dress, rendered the strange and almost unreal scene obscene in the eyes of the public of the day. Manet himself jokingly nicknamed his painting "la partie carrée". In those days, Manet's style and treatment were considered as shocking as the subject itself. He made no transition between the light and dark elements of the picture, abandoning the usual subtle gradations in favour of brutal contrasts, thereby drawing reproaches for his "mania for seeing in blocks". And the characters seem to fit uncomfortably in the sketchy background of woods from which Manet has deliberately excluded both depth and perspective.

Le déjeuner sur l'herbe - testimony to Manet's refusal to conform to convention and his initiation of a new freedom from traditional subjects and modes of representation - can perhaps be considered as the departure point for Modern Art. Edouard Manet | The Luncheon on the Grass | Detail | Rosenstiel's The Luncheon on the Grass Also show Prints and Posters Also show Fine Art Editions Edouard Manet - The Luncheon on the Grass Image Detail more ... Artist Biography Manet was born in 1832 and died in 1883. He was one of the first 19th Century artists to paint modern life and thus a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. His early masterworks "The Luncheon on the Grass" and "Olympia", both painted in 1863, caused great controversy and they are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art. Manet was born to an affluent and well connected family and his Uncle, Edmond Fournier, gave him a great deal of encouragement. His proximity to and the time spent in the Louvre was a great influence on him, as was his travels throughout Europe and to Brazil.

Manet was a close friend of Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne and Pissarro and especially of Berthe Morisot, who is credited with convincing Manet to attempt plein air painting. Manet married Suzanne Leenhoff in 1863 and his wife featured in a number of his paintings. In his later years, Manet suffered from rheumatism and syphilis and is buried in the Passy Cemetery in Paris. © Felix Rosenstiel´s Widow & Son Ltd 2016 | Terms of Use Manet, Olympia | Realism (video) | Khan Academy Manet, Olympia Édouard Manet, Olympia, oil on canvas, 1863 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker Édouard Manet brought to Realism his curiosity about social mores. However, he was not interested in mirroring polite parlor conversations and middle class promenades in the Bois de Boulogne (Paris’ Central Park). Rather, Manet invented subjects that set the Parisians’ teeth on edge.

In 1865, Manet submitted his risqué painting of a courtesan greeting her client (in this case, you), Olympia, of 1863, to the French Salon. The jury for the 1865 Salon accepted this painting despite their disapproval of the subject matter, because two years earlier, Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass created such a stir when it was rejected from the Salon. (It was instead exhibited in Emperor Napoleon III’s conciliatory exhibition—the Salon des Réfusés, or the Exhibition of the Refused. Crowds came to the Salon des Réfusés specifically to laugh and jeer at what they considered Manet’s folly.) Somehow they were afraid another rejection would seem like a personal attack on Manet himself. The reasoning was odd, but the result was the same—Olympia became infamous and the painting had to be hung very high to protect it from physical attacks. Manet was a Realist, but sometimes his “real” situations shocked and rocked the Parisian art world to its foundations. His later work was much tamer. (Text by Dr. Beth Gersh-Nesic) . Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.

Impressionism Video transcript (piano playing) Steven: There's a long tradition of the female nude represented in the most erotic, sensualist way. Clothed by mythology or clothed by sheer beauty. Beth: It's a tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks and Romans in sculptures, for example, of the goddess Venus, modestly covering her body after her bath. And Manet in this painting that we're looking at here at the Musée d'Orsay, is clearly drawing on those traditions but doing something radically modern. Steven: The immediate model for Manet was Titian's Venus of Urbino, except that he's stripping away the academic technique of the representation of space, of the turn of the body, but he's also stripping away that veil of mythology. Beth: And here at the Musée d'Orsay, we can see in traditional nudes as Venus painted in a traditional way, clearly the images that Manet's Olympia is speaking to. Steven: So by academic art, we're talking about the kind of art that was sanctioned by the official Academy that was associated with the government of France. Beth: It didn't challenge, particularly, it satisfied. Steven: Well for a couple of reasons.

For one, because it had the stamp of the official state. These were the leading artists of the time, they were saying this art is of quality and so of course it had a ready market value. But at the same time it was art that was formulaic, that was expected. Beth: Well there was an idea that there was a definition of great art and there was no point in looking for what was new or different because great art was self evident, great art was based on the classical and the Renaissance. And what someone like Manet is doing is challenging those very established ideas. Ideas that seemed as natural as the sun coming up in the morning. She's not a Venus, her name is Olympia and she looks very much like a real woman in a real apartment in Paris. Steven: So wait a minute, so how do you know she looks like a real woman, as opposed to a Venus? We don't know what a Venus looks like. Beth: Her features are not idealized. They're not perfected. When we look at ancient Greek sculpture or Renaissance paintings of the nude we have a woman who is perfectly beautiful.

And you can see her face is asymmetrical and her lips are a little bit too thin, she doesn't have that perfection. Steven: In addition, the representations of the academic artists always show Venus or other nudes in a coy way. This woman is looking directly at us. She is sentient, she is thinking and she's confronting us even as we look at her. Beth: And so there was a real problem I think for the viewers of this painting. There's no way to look at her and pretend that it was about beauty. One was confronted by her sexuality, there was no way to say, "I'm just looking at the ideal image of Venus, of the idea of beauty." Here the reality of a nude woman is present. Steven: And it's even coarser than that because this woman was recognized as a courtesan, that is a kind of prostitute. Beth: The name Olympia was common for prostitutes at that time in Paris. Steven: And what we're seeing here is Olympia's servant handing her flowers that presumably have just come from one of her patrons, one of her customers. We must have, as the customer, walked into the room and startled the cat at the foot of the bed, as well as the two figures.

And so there is this vulgarity here, there really is doing even more than just stripping away the mythology that's confronting 19th century Paris with its own corruption. Beth: When we use the word prostitute we think of a figure of much lower class and here we have a woman who is obviously a higher class prostitute. Steven: The reaction of the press was pretty vicious. Beth: The press said she looked like a cadaver. She looked like she was dead. Manet outlined her in black and hardly modeled her flesh. Steven: What's interesting is that some of the caricatures that were made of this emphasize the shadow on her hands and feet, and some of the press actually spoke of her hands being filthy. It's interesting that those are the only areas where there's significant modeling. Beth: Where one would expect to see modeling on the female nude would be in the abdomen, around the breasts, and here Manet's kept that really flat and you're right, the areas that we do see shadow are unexpected so the press interpreted her hand as drawing attention to her sexuality even though nudes for centuries had shown women with their hand placed across their genitals.

Steven: You mentioned the kind of flatness of her body and some art historians even said she's a bit of a paper cut out, but Manet of course in so much of his work really does reject the clear articulation of represented space and confronts the viewer with the complexity of painting on a two-dimensional surface. And an area where you can really see that are, for instance, in the way the toes peek out from under her slipper. There is this awkwardness that reminds us that all of this is illusion and that in fact there is just this two-dimensionality of this canvas. Beth: There's a kind of unmasking. Manet is saying, "I'm not going to pretend that my painting isn't paint. "I'm not going to present you with this perfect illusion," the way that academic artists are doing where you don't even see a brush stroke. So he's insisting on unmasking that illusion and then he's insisting on unmasking the illusion of our own interests in looking at these images. He's reminding us that our interest here is a sexual one. Steven: Right, in so many traditional representations of the nude because the figure is not looking out at us, we can comfortably look at her.

But here we're confronted by her gaze and by her thinking and there is a much more problematic experience here. Beth: And that's in the fact that she's a real woman, she's contemporary and the way she picks her head up, the way she looks out at us, the angularity of her body, it's in all those things. And people at the time, 1865, recognized it. Steven: So this is a painting that is only partially about the nude. This is a painting about art making and about the kinds of conventions that exist in art and making us, the viewer, aware of those conventions even as we look at this painting. Beth: Manet is saying let's be honest about the materials, let's be honest about the subject and our motives and desires, and I think that that is a really interesting thing for art to do. The great poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire called on artists to paint the beauty of modern life and I think Manet is taking up that call. Steven: Manet is inventing what beauty could be for the modern world.

(piano playing) Servier | A touch of france: Manet, the Man Who Invented Modern Art | Medicographia A touch of france: Manet, the Man Who Invented Modern Art Manet, the Man Who Invented Modern Art An exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay (5 April – 3 July 2011) I . Spaak, France Seldom has a painter been as decried and mocked during his lifetime as Édouard Manet. Whenever he presented his paintings at the Paris Salons, where the exhibited works were supposed to reflect the aesthetic canons of official art, Manet was disparaged, criticized. Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) (1863) and Olympia (1863) scandalized the public, outraged by Manet’s disregard for accepted standards of behavior. Critics scoffed at the force of his colors, at his bold perspectives. Yet rarely was an artist so energetically supported by his peers. Painters, writers, and politicians came to the defense of this charming, urbane, determined man.

Often considered as a precursor of the Impressionist movement, in which he counted as friends Renoir, Monet, and others, he was above all a solitary painter striving for reality in the intimacy of his studio. In the catalogue of an exhibition organized at his expense on the fringe of the 1867 Salon he wrote “Mr Manet has no intention of overthrowing old methods of painting or of creating new ones. He simply seeks to be himself and not someone else.” Innovative, unfettered by links with any formalism, Manet was the first modernist painter. Medicographia. 2011;33:219-225 (see French abstract on page 225) “Monsieur Manet is curt, has the last word. He captures his figures vividly, doesn’t shrink before the harshness of nature, invigorates objects by detaching them one from another.

His whole being wills him to see by spots, by simple and vibrant flecks.” These words of the novelist Emile Zola appeared in the 7 May 1866 edition of the newspaper L’Événement, in the first of a long series of generally complimentary articles on Édouard Manet (born and died in Paris: 1832-1883). This trenchant tribute to the immense talent of the artist whose Fifer he had just discovered at the 1866 Paris Salon was paid at a time when Manet was under constant attack by the art world for paintings that drew an angry response from chroniclers and public alike at the Salons, those annual displays of artworks intended to convey what in France was deemed to be good pictorial sense.

Lola de Valence (1862), Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe [The Luncheon on the Grass] (1863), Olympia (1863), and The Dead Toreador (1864-1865) engendered controversy because of their subject matter and workmanship, yet Zola was not alone in championing Manet, whose painting was praised by major figures in the arts and public affairs: Delacroix, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Degas, Monet, Fantin-Latour, Antonin Proust. A precursor of Impressionism, a movement of which he was not part, Manet remained a “revolutionary” throughout his life, the artist of modernity, the “liberator of painting.” Sarcasm and gibes Many were the criticisms leveled at Manet over the years. In 1860, his portrait of his parents—Portrait of Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet—was deemed vulgar, too dark, a depiction of the resignation of an austere upper class couple of Second Empire France after years of married life.

In fact, Manet was in no way seeking to idealize intimacy, but rather to capture a moment in time, a social image of an era. It was a clear reference to the Portrait of Monsieur Bertin by Ingres who, wrote Manet, had sought “to symbolize an age.” The Fifer. 1866, oil on canvas, 161×97 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. © Musée d’Orsay (dis. RMN)/Patrice Schmidt. Manet was once again at the center of controversy at the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected) in 1863, when he was accused of transgressing the rules of perspective, and of morality in The Luncheon on the Grass. Manet’s depiction of a naked young woman seated on the grass among trees beside two fully clothed men clashed with the social customs and esthetic canons of the day. Yet through its attention to detail in the splendid still life of the foreground and its simplification of the rest of the composition, this realistic scene firmly placed Manet in a direct line from Gustave Courbet.

Uproar followed at the 1865 Paris Salon. In his Olympia, Manet wittily side-stepped tradition by replacing the faithful little dog of, say, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, by a black cat, fur on end, tail erect, at the foot of a courtesan’s bed. The public was not amused. Not by the cat, and certainly not by the naked young woman reclining on her bed. Nothing was right with this painting. The model’s “livid color,” “the lines drawn in charcoal, her bloodshot and greenish eyes.” Fun was made of the black ribbon around her throat, the lascivious pose, the exaggerated importance given to the flowers (perhaps from a client), to the black maid beside the bed. Portrait of Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet. 1860, oil on canvas, 110×90 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. © Musée d’Orsay (dis. RMN)/Patrice Schmidt. What outraged public and critics alike was above all the theme: this modern Venus awaiting a client.

“What is this yellow-bellied odalisque, a base model picked up I know not where, who represents Olympia? Olympia? What Olympia? A courtesan, no doubt” wrote Jules Claretie in Le Figaro. There may have been over three thousand canvasses at the Salon, but visitors seemed only to have eyes for Olympia. Laughter too, sniggers and protests. Outraged, some even threatened to take down the picture. Antonin Proust later wrote that Olympia escaped destruction “only because of the precautions taken by the administrators,” who ordered the canvass to be hung beyond the reach of canes. “At a height,” wrote Jules Claretie mockingly, “where even lousy paintings are never hung, above a giganticdoorof the last roomwhere itwas hard to tell whether one was looking at a pile of naked flesh or a pile of linen.” Manet later wrote that “the insults rained down,” and to his friend Charles Baudelaire, then in Brussels, “I wish you were here my dear Baudelaire. I would have liked to have your opinion of my paintings.” The poet wrote back: “So I have to speak of you again.

I have to make every effort to show what you are worth. What you demand is really foolish. They scorn you; the jokes annoy you; they don’t do you justice, etc, etc. Do you believe you are the first man in this position? Are you a greater genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? Much scorn was heaped on them. Yet they survived. And so as not to swell you with too much pride, I will say that these men are models, and that you, you are just the first in the decay of your art.” Zola was surprised at being “the first to praise Monsieur Manet unreservedly.” He determined to “lend him a helping hand” and to rebel against the image created of him “as an outcast, an unpopular and grotesque painter.” Addressing the artist, Zola wrote: “Console yourself. You have been set apart, and you deserve to live apart. You don’t think like all those people, you paint according to your heart, according to your flesh, yours is definitely an assertive personality. Your canvasses are ill at ease alongside the foolishness and sentimentality of the time.” Olympia.

1863, oil on canvas, 130.5×190 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. © Musée d’Orsay (dis. RMN)/Patrice Schmidt. That Olympia is a reference to Velázquez and to Goya’s The Naked Maja is unquestionable. And the pose of Titian’s Venus of Urbino probably inspired that of Victorine Meurent, Manet’s favorite model and an impudent young Olympia. But unlike the young woman of the Venetian master, there is nothing sweet, ideal, or chaste about Victorine. Manet didn’t make of her a symbol in the way the professors at the School of Fine Arts taught, but a young woman of her time. No allegorical alibi. A common prostitute like so many others of the period. “I render the things that I see as simply as possible,” explained Manet. “So, Olympia, what could be more naïve? There’s harshness I amtold. It was there, I saw it. I painted what I saw.” For that is the art of Manet.

Painting that does without eloquence, an art inspired by a reality rendered with tremendous inventiveness and exemplary spirit, as well as “great brutality, rare vigor, and vivid hues” (Zola). Lola de Valence. 1862, oil on canvas, 123×192 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. © Giraudon/Bridgeman Giraudon. A revolutionary who admired the old masters Original itmay be, butManet liked to cultivate his style through reference to the oldmasters—the Italians Titian, Tintoretto, and above all Veronese, Rubens, the Dutch, and the Spanish, especially Velázquez, “the painter’s painter,” in whom he found his “ideal in painting.” This taste for Spain—theater, flamenco, bullfighting, tragedy—inspired in Manet’s work bright colors, violent blacks, piercing looks, in masterpieces like Lola de Valence (1862), The Spanish Ballet (1862), and Victorine in the Costume of an Espada (1862).

And Boy Carrying a Sword (1861), the model for which was eleven-year-old Leon Koëlla- Leenhoff (1852-1927) who often posed for Manet, notably for Soap Bubbles (1867) and Luncheon in the Studio (1868). Leon’s mother was Suzanne Leenhoff, but it is unclear which Manet fathered the child, the painter’s father Auguste or Édouard himself, who married Suzanne in 1863 after Auguste’s death. Concision and elegance Manet was accused of making his models look ugly. So it was that when he painted the young wife of one of his friends in the Portrait of Madame Brunet (1860), without disguising the distinctive features of her homely face, she fled in tears on discovering the canvass, which she declined. Manet simply refused the gradations of shadows that were fashionable.

His paintings contain nothing precious or sentimental, but instead great poetry and bold perspectives, whether frontal, as in Races at Longchamp, or shifted, as in The Dead Toreador (1864-1865) whose lifeless body is lit as if by a projector against a dark background, lying diagonally across the canvass from bottom right to upper left. The Dead Toreador. 1864-5, oil on canvas, 75.9×153.3 cm. The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA. © Widener Collection/Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. “Conciseness in art,” wrote Manet, “is a necessity and an elegance (…). In a figure, seek intense light and dark shade, the rest will follow. … And then, cultivate your memory, for nature will never give you just information— it’s like a guardrail that stops you falling into triteness. You must always remain the master and do what pleases you. Not a chore! Oh, no, not a chore!” AndManet’s appeal was achieved through unstinting work in the studio, accurate observation of objects, and by following his own path.

A kindly socialite An upper middle-class Parisian, delightful, never pompous or haughty, Manet was charming, attractive to women, and to his models and friends. Most certainly though he was not the frivolous character that some made him out to be. A studio painter, Manet openly proclaimed his admiration for the great masters and worked alone while admirably depicting what was new in his time. He never stopped inventing, provoking, or reflecting the sensuality of the world that surrounded him. At his funeral, Degas is reported to have said “He was greater than we thought.” Around 35 years of age, Manet was, Zola wrote, “of average height, on the small rather than tall side. Light brown hair and beard; deep and narrow eyes with full of youthful liveliness and ardor; characteristic mouth, thin, mobile, a tad mocking at the corners.” A dandy in love with the world who “finds secret voluptuous delight in the scented and luminous refinement of evenings,” continued Zola.

“He is doubtless drawn in by his love of bright and broad colors; but deep within him there is also an innate need for the distinction and elegance that I find in his works.” Zola contrasted the Manet who charmed because of his physique and manners with the depiction by “contemporary wags” of “a kind of ragamuffin, a ridiculous bogeyman.” Manet was a man-about-town, a keen observer of Parisian life in cafés, at the Races at Longchamp—the latest craze among Parisians—at the theater. “I like this existence,” he wrote. “I like the receptions, the noise, the lights, the parties… in a word the colors.” He recreated an atmosphere in a few lines, annotated the drawings, made a new study, and then painted the canvass. As close to reality as possible, but with his way of seeing, his angle, his touch of genius. “A most delicate accuracy between the tones. A somewhat dry charm, penetrating, truly human,” wrote Zola.

_ The rapport with his models “When I start something,” said Manet, “I tremble to think that models will fail me, that I won’t see them again as often as I would wish or in the conditions that I’d like. They come, they pose, they leave thinking: he’ll finish it on his own. Well actually no! One finishes nothing alone.” Each figure in Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) is identifiable as a friend who posed patiently for Manet. As for those in the Masked Ball at the Opera (1873), in his quest for realism Manet had them come in groups to his studio. The situations he depicts are plausible, real. A girl asked to pose as a Waitress Serving Beer (1879), fearing she might be propositioned, insisted her fiancé be present, so Manet included him in the foreground, smoking his pipe. The Balcony. 1868-9, oil on canvas, 170×124.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. © Giraudon/Bridgeman Giraudon.

_ The rapport with his models “When I start something,” said Manet, “I tremble to think that models will fail me, that I won’t see them again as often as I would wish or in the conditions that I’d like. They come, they pose, they leave thinking: he’ll finish it on his own. Well actually no! One finishes nothing alone.” Each figure in Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) is identifiable as a friend who posed patiently for Manet. As for those in the Masked Ball at the Opera (1873), in his quest for realism Manet had them come in groups to his studio. The situations he depicts are plausible, real. A girl asked to pose as a Waitress Serving Beer (1879), fearing she might be propositioned, insisted her fiancé be present, so Manet included him in the foreground, smoking his pipe. The Execution of Emperor Maximilian. 1867-8, oil on canvas, 252×305 cm. Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim, Germany. © Giraudon/Bridgeman Giraudon.

A man of his time, Manet depicted contemporary events— The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867), and luminaries of the age—Clémenceau, Zola, Mallarmé, Antonin Proust, and Henri Rochefort, the founder of the newspaper La Lanterne who in 1874 escaped by boat from a penal colony in New Caledonia, where he had been deported for life for supporting the 1871 Paris Commune. It was a young woman from a good family who would become one of Manet’s most bewitching muses. A friend of Degas, Renoir, and Monet, a painter herself, Berthe Morisot was a member of the large group of Impressionists that Manet rubbed shoulders with. Arranged by their mutual friend Henri Fantin-Latour, the meeting between Berthe and Manet took place in 1868 at the Louvre where she was copying a painting by Rubens. Manet took an interest in Berthe’s work and suggested they meet again.

He discovered that she was both passionate and gentle, as well as a “devilish beauty,” especially because of her eyes, which were an intense black, a favorite of the painter, emblematic of his style. Édouard Manet was the painter Berthe most admired among her contemporaries. Sometimes she was inspired by the same subjects; Manet did several portraits of her. Shortly after their meeting, he painted The Balcony (around 1868-1869), a studio composition inspired by Goya’s Majas on a Balcony. _ Femme fatale Berthe Morisot is shown seated, pensive, a closed fan held in interlocking fingers, her right forearmresting on the balcony guard rail. Standing beside her the young violinist Fanny Claus is flirtatious. Behind them stands a man smoking a cigar (another close acquaintance: Antoine Guillemet, a landscape painter). Berthe Morisot With a Bouquet of Violets. 1872, oil on canvas, 55×39 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France.

© Giraudon/Bridgeman Giraudon On leaving the 1869 Salon where Le Balcon was exhibited, Berthe wrote to her sister: “I found Manet, wearing a hat in full sunlight, looking stunned. He asked me to go and see his painting because he didn’t daremove. I’ve never seen such an expressive physiognomy. He laughed, then seemed worried, saying that the picture was very bad, but then adding it was a great success. Decidedly he has a most charming nature which pleases me greatly. His paintings produce as always the impression of a wild, even tart fruit. They are far from displeasing. I am more strange than ugly; it appears thatthe epithet femme fatale has been circulating among curious onlookers.” After The Balcony, Berthe posed for Manet more than any other model. Their artistic understanding allowed Manet boldness and freedom, as in the portrait Berthe Morisot With a Bouquet of Violets (1872) where she is dressed in black, her hair tousled beneath a black hat, the white neckline of her blouse accentuated by the mauve of the flowers.

Paul Valéry would later say “I do not rank anything in Manet’s work higher than a certain portrait of Berthe Morisot dated 1872.” Manet always had a predilection for flowers and fruits, whether in large compositions, such as the mandarin oranges and roses in front of the waitress of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881-1882), or as the main subject of his delightful still lifes, such as Pinks and Clematis in a Crystal Vase (1882). Peonies, lemons, asparagus, peaches, figs, and grapes are everywhere. But make no mistake, these are still lifes painted in the artist’s studio, and not in the open air as by his Impressionist friends. It is true Manet on occasion left Paris to paint outdoors, as when he visited his friend Monet at Argenteuil, but it would be a mistake to confuse him with these painters of fleeting impressions. And anyway, it matters little who Manet is confused with. What is important is that he always sought to be true to what he saw, leaving others to say whatever they will.

_ Pinks and Clematis in a Crystal Vase. 1882, oil on canvas, 56×35.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. © Giraudon/Bridgeman Giraudon. Luncheon on the Grass, by Édouard Manet | Color Painting Art Luncheon on the Grass, by Édouard Manet “Luncheon on the Grass” Oil Painting on canvas. Édouard Manet In 1863, Édouard Manet shocked the French public by exhibiting his Déjeuner sur l’herbe (“Luncheon on the Grass“). It is not a realist painting in the social or political sense of Daumier, but it is a statement in favor of the artist’s individual freedom. The shock value of a nude woman casually lunching with two fully dressed men, which was an affront to the propriety of the time, was accentuated by the familiarity of the figures. Manet’s wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, and his favorite model, Victorine Meurent, both posed for the nude woman, which has Meurent’s face, but Leenhoff’s plumper body.

Her body is starkly lit and she stares directly at the viewer. The two men are Manet’s brother Gustave Manet and his future brother-in-law, Ferdinand Leenhoff. They are dressed like young dandies. The men seem to be engaged in conversation, ignoring the woman. In front of them, the woman’s clothes, a basket of fruit, and a round loaf of bread are displayed, as in a still life. In the background a lightly clad woman bathes in a stream. Too large in comparison with the figures in the foreground, she seems to float above them. The roughly painted background lacks depth – giving the viewer the impression that the scene is not taking place outdoors, but in a studio. This impression is reinforced by the use of broad “photographic” light, which casts almost no shadows: in fact, the lighting of the scene is inconsistent and unnatural. The man on the right wears a flat hat with a tassel, of a kind normally worn indoors. Despite the mundane subject, Manet deliberately chose a large canvas size, normally reserved for historical subjects. The style of the painting breaks with the academic traditions of the time.

He did not try to hide the brush strokes: indeed, the painting looks unfinished in some parts of the scene. The nude is a far cry from the smooth, flawless figures of Cabanel or Ingres. Study notes, Source: Wikipedia archives ARCHIVES Index Luncheon on the grass (Le dejeuner sur l'herbe). Édouard Manet. 1863. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France. The judgment of Paris. Marcantonio Raimondi. 1515. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. LUNCHEON ON THE GRASS (ÉDOUARD MANET) Though Édouard Manet never enjoyed popular acceptance and acclaim as an artist, his early masterworks, Olympia and Luncheon in the grass, were a cultural watershed that marked the advent of Modern Art and laid the groundwork for the Impressionistic movement. Both works also ignited a furious public outcry which prompted Manet to lament: The insults rain down on me like hail. Modern art historians, attempting to explain the furor over these two paintings, look to their cultural context.

During the 1860's, although it was common practice for Victorian men to seek paid sexual services, it was quite another for them to be confronted with it. One major reason Luncheon in the grass was so controversial was that many interpreted the scene as referencing the Bois de Boulogne, a large Parisian park. In 1863, when the painting was on exhibition, the Bois de Boulogne was a well-known site for prostitution. For the Parisians, it was one thing to know about the sexual activities in that park, but it was quite another to publicly reveal it. In their eyes, Manet was breaking a closely held sexual taboo. NOTES Luncheon on the grass has its source in Judgment of Paris by Marcantonio Raimondi, designed by Raphael (1510-20) (note lower right side).

Question: Who painted Olympia and The Luncheon on the Grass both in 1863?
Answer: Edouard Manet